Friday, November 19, 1999

11/19/99 8:34:44 pm

thread("gum") ?>
Judge appoints a mediator if Microsoft, DoJ want to talk.
Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson
appointed
a fellow jurist to help Microsoft and the Justice Department reach a
settlement, if the two sides decide to get together and try. Richard
Posner, chief judge for the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in
Chicago, will have full discretion in setting out the "manner and
duration" of any such talks. A Microsoft spokesman said the
appointment was "potentially a very positive step."

Thursday, November 18, 1999

A new way to probe a network.
The SANS Institute (a non-profit
organization of system and network
administrators) has issued an advisory, and a request for assistance,
on a new form of network probe. Within the last week admins
have been reporting unrequested ICMP echo replies -- that is,
ping echo replies on their networks for which there were no
corresponding echo requests. This technique could function
as a stealthy network mapping scan: when a probe arrives for a host
that doesn't exist, an internal router will reply with an "unreachable"
message. By finding all the unreachable hosts, an attacker would be
able to enumerate the hosts that do exist, in order to target them
for later, loving attention.

The SANS Institute issued this request for help in profiling this new
intrusion threat.

If your site has instrumentation and can detect echo replies for
which there are no echo requests, please sanitize your internal
addresses and send the trace here. If we receive enough
information to write a report, the latest information will be posted
on the SANS web site.

Thanks to TBTF Irregular Mark Gibbs for the forward.

Wednesday, November 17, 1999

11/17/99 1:54:44 pm

thread("msb") ?>
Do not entrust a password to Windows CE.
Bill Gates pushed Windows CE at Comdex, but it's beginning to look
like Palm OS has won and WinCE is destined for the ash-heap of
history. In recent weeks both Philips Electronics and South Korea's
LG Electronics have
pulled
their Windows CE-based handhelds from the market -- they just
weren't selling. And at Comdex, Everexannounced
that it too will abandon its non-starter line of WinCE-based
portables. The biggest blow so far, though, was Sony's
choice
of the PalmOS over WinCE for its yet-to-be-developed line of
consumer portable gadgets.

In his CRYPTO-GRAM newsletter (see TBTF
Sources), Bruce Schneier broke news of yet more trouble for
WinCE. Seems its developers, out of laziness or time pressure, have
ripped a massive hole in the security of any Windows NT password
stored on a WinCE device. Let Schneier describe it:

Microsoft encrypts your Windows NT password when stored on a Windows
CE device. But if you look carefully at their encryption algorithm,
they simply XOR the password with "susageP", Pegasus spelled
backwards. Pegasus is the code name of Windows CE. This is so
pathetic it's staggering.

Sunday, November 14, 1999

This venue represents an experiment in more timely and less "cooked"
TBTF news coverage. You'll read here things that came through my
desktop machine mere minutes before. The TBTF Log replaces the Tasty
Bit of the Day feature.

The week's TBTF Log entries will be mailed to TBTF subscribers on
Sunday evenings.

The email and Web editions of Tasty Bits from the Technology Front
represent my best effort to present engaging, cogent news and analysis
on what matters to the life of the Net. TBTF will continue as before,
but on a schedule closer to twice-monthly than to weekly.